Ghosts of our recent past

New books about Jim Crow-era injustices have much to tell us — and even offer us hope for the future

Editor’s note: This is part of an ongoing series by Chris Vognar on the cultural legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

The last two weeks have injected overwhelming anguish into the discussion of American race relations. How did we get here? What’s wrong with us? Will it ever end?

These are all important questions. But they can’t be asked in a historical vacuum, as a surge of recent and upcoming books about Jim Crow and its legacy is quick to remind us. These new works offer stories about the miscarriage of justice, and about the challenges of policing and police brutality. They take place in Florida, Georgia, Alabama and Virginia, but they have parallels all over the country.

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I have been working on and looking forward to writing this article for months. Now, part of me wishes I didn’t have to write it. Like most of us, I want to salve and heal. It’s been a very, very long several days.

But it’s hard to heal in the present if you don’t take a hard look at the past. These books — nonfiction, plus one novel — relay hard-to-fathom stories, create an overview of a bloody 20th century, and provide a dose of context for where we find ourselves today.

Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in Americaby Patrick Phillips (coming September)

THE YEAR:1912

THE PLACE:Forsyth County, Ga.

THE STORY:A young white girl’s murder led townspeople to hang two black teenagers and violently purge the county of its black residents. The incident reverberated well into the 20th century: In 1987, a group of civil rights activists was attacked by local residents fighting to ”Keep Forsyth White.”

The most acclaimed of the bunch is Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove, a twisting legal thriller set in the Central Florida citrus country of the 1940s and ’50s. Devil won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, and King will discuss the book this week at two Dallas events celebrating the Pulitzer Centennial: Thursday night at the Dallas Public Library and Friday night at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference.

Asked why so many of these stories are emerging now, King turned to more recent history.

“I think we’re seeing technology catch up a little bit,” he said by phone. “You’re starting to see these cellphone cameras, and they defy what you hear and read in the police reports. Even though this is going back to the days of Rodney King, when you had videotaped beatings, I think it’s more prevalent now, and it seems every couple weeks you see something like this.”

King said this two weeks ago, before Baton Rouge, before St. Paul, and before the Dallas shooting.

Hidden stories

The killing of Emmett Till is one of the better-known race-based atrocities of mid-20th century U.S. history. His mother, Mamie Mobley, grieved at her son’s casket in a Chicago funeral home. (1955 File Photo/Chicago Sun-Times)

Some Jim Crow chapters have been extensively chronicled and established as part of school curricula: the 1955 mutilation and lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till, for the crime of speaking to a young white woman in Mississippi; or the murder of the NAACP’s Medgar Evers in 1963, at the hands of a white supremacist, also in Mississippi.

But these latest books examine seldom-told stories that never percolated to the surface of public consciousness.

Devil in the Grove is one such story you can’t believe you didn’t know about. In 1949, Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall, who had close ties to the Ku Klux Klan, arranged the framing of four black youths on a rape charge. Evidence, as was usually the case in such stories, was scant. McCall later murdered one of the suspects after inventing a story about an escape attempt.

McCall served seven consecutive terms as sheriff. He lost the race for his eighth term in 1972, after he was acquitted of the murder of a mentally ill black prisoner in his custody.

**Gilbert King will be speaking at the Dallas Public Library Thursday and July 22 at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. Scroll down for details.

Devil in the Groveby Gilbert King (2012; Pulitzer winner for nonfiction)

THE YEAR:1949

THE PLACE:Lake County, Fla.

THE STORY:Four black youths were framed for the rape of a white woman after she had a fight with her husband. One was later murdered by Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall. Thurgood Marshall, years before he argued the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case, fought an uphill battle in Florida courts on the Groveland Boys’ behalf.

King is quick to point out McCall hardly acted alone. “I never really looked at Willis McCall as the titular devil in the case,” the author says. “The devil to me was always just the system of oppression, the legalized white supremacy that was just hanging over this entire area.”

If the Devil tale was little known, so, too, is the story of Truevine, a true tale about race and exploitation coming in October from author Beth Macy.

Macy had heard stories about George and Willie Muse, the black albino brothers abducted from the Virginia tobacco fields and turned into circus freaks. She wrote about the Muse Brothers when she was a reporter for the Roanoke Times. But it took a while to gain enough trust from the Muse family to make Truevine possible.

Macy also had to confront the conventional wisdom that nobody wants to hear such horrible true stories.

“There’s this discord between people who want to hear stories like this, and people who don’t,” Macy said in an interview at BookExpo America in May. “You hear people say, ‘We didn’t enslave them, we didn’t contribute to them being abused.’ I’m just trying to paint a picture of America in the years following the Civil War up to the civil rights movement.”

Truevineby Beth Macy (available October)

THE YEAR:1899

THE PLACE:Truevine, Va.

THE STORY:George and Willie Muse, black albino brothers, were kidnapped from the Virginia fields and sent to perform in a circus freak show. Their mother, Harriett Muse, spent years trying to find them.

That discord is alive and well. And while some readers might ask (probably in the comments section) about the relevance of such long-ago injustices, Laurence Leamer’s The Lynching, which came out in June, covers events as recent as 1981.

That was when two Ku Klux Klan members, irate that a jury refused to convict a black man in a murder case, picked up a different, randomly selected black man, beat him senseless, cut his throat and hung him on a tree in the streets of Mobile, Ala. Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center seized the case as an opportunity to file a landmark lawsuit against the Klan.

The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle that brought down the Klanby Laurence Leamer (available now)

THE YEAR:1981

THE PLACE:Mobile, Ala.

THE STORY:Two Ku Klux Klan members picked up a random 19-year-old black man and hung him on the streets of Mobile. Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center seized the case as an opportunity to file a landmark lawsuit against the Klan.

If you’re young enough, 1981 was forever ago. In the scope of American history, however, it was yesterday, and 1949 was the day before yesterday. The racial tension and violence we’re struggling with today has been with us a long time, even if it’s hard to see that in the heat, trauma and anger of the moment.

Some hope in fiction?

As Dallas Police Chief David Brown earned well-deserved praise over the past week, and we got to know his biography — son killed by police, brother murdered by drug dealers, his former partner killed in the line of duty — my mind flashed to the upcoming novel Darktown.

Darktownby Thomas Mullen (available September)

THE YEAR:1948

THE PLACE:Atlanta, Ga.

THE STORY:In this historical novel, officers Lucius Boggs and Tommie Smith are among the first black policemen to serve Atlanta. They try to solve a tricky murder case under trying work conditions: Like their real-life counterparts, Boggs and Smith aren’t allowed to arrest white suspects, drive squad cars, or enter police headquarters. They work out of the basement of a YMCA.

Thomas Mullen’s book, out in September, is in development as a TV series to be produced by Jamie Foxx and Amy Pascal. It follows officers Lucius Boggs and Tommie Smith, among the first black cops in Atlanta, through a hairy 1948 murder case.

Mullen did his research: Like their real-life counterparts, Boggs and Smith aren’t allowed to arrest white suspects, drive squad cars, or enter police headquarters. They work out of the basement of a YMCA. They’re resented by the white police, who see black officers as an affront to Southern life, and by residents of the black neighborhoods they patrol, who don’t like to be rousted.

“I was fascinated by the dual role they had as second-class citizens, black men in the Jim Crow South, but also authority figures, cops carrying a badge and a gun, enforcing the laws of a city that oppresses them,” says Mullen, who lives in Atlanta and was also at BookExpo America. “It would have been a very thankless job in so many ways. Some of them quit, some of them did not last very long, but some of them did endure a very long time.”

They endured through perseverance. They survived the hard times. They slowly gained trust and acceptance.